“This ain’t your grandma’s Celeron”

Summary: 

      I thought I would mix things up today and review a processor from the often loathed and despised  Intel Celeron lineup. I recently purchased a new budget laptop (Gateway ML6230) which among other things featured an Intel Celeron M 520 processor running at 1.6GHz. Generally, I used to advise people not to buy Celerons, regarding them as grotesquely inferior and if not already, soon to be obsolete.  For the most part, my apprehensions have turned out to be unwarrented. Straight out of the box performance was very soggy and multi-tasking was definitly an exercise in patience . After testing the laptop with the installed 512 MB of memory  and then again with 2 GB, I can honestly say that it was like night and day in terms of responsivness and productivity. Before the upgrade just loading the operating system and anti-virus took 5 or 6 mins. After the memory boost, programs loaded 5x quicker and the amount of programs I could open simultaneously without any percieved degradation in  speed went up exponentially(From around 3-4 to 20-25). This is not to say that the entire line of Celeron processors perform equally. Apparently, under the hood the 520’s implement Intel’s ”Core” based technology. In other words you could say it’s an Intel Core 2 Uno or single cored Core 2 Duo.

       In short, the Celeron M 520 is an excellent processor for web browsing, text, 2d games, desktop publishing, heck it even runs Google Earth flawlessly. My attitude towards the Celeron and possibly Sempron processors has definitly done a 180. The real problem now seems to be that budget computers are generally sold RAM starved. For manufactuers to ship a computer with a meagre 512MB of RAM *especially*  with Vista is just plain criminal.

Bottom Line : If you aren’t a gamer who needs massive amounts of processing power, then I encourage you to give the next budget computer you see a second look; just make sure to upgrade the memory.

As always comments,questions, or suggestions are always appreciated.

Today this week we have the Norcent LM-965WA LCD monitor.

Summary:

As you can see in the pictures, visually the monitor lacks any really striking features that set it apart from the others. If it weren’t for the silver control panel it would be an excellent candidate in the Most Boring Looking Monitor Pageant. Looks aside, the image quality is above average and despite the screens matte finish the vibrancy and colors still pop. The LM-965WA sports a native resolution of 1440×900 with typical response time and the model tested had no dead/stuck pixels . In short, the build quality is decent but lacks in areas and image quality is on par with much more expensive Dells’ and Samsungs’.

Cons:

The base/stand both feel a bit rickety and cheap, however if you’re not a person who constantly adjusts their screen 1000x a day you should be fine.

Price:

Varies, I’ve seen it as low as $140 and as high as $230 10/28/2007

Full Detailed Specs Availible here

*FIXED*

     After an exausting search for an answer to the matter of why my brand new 19″ widescreen monitor’s native resolution (1440×900) was unavailible in the display properties, I finally stumbled upon an article a person posted on Intel’s forums that basically explained what shannanigans Intel had been up to with their GMA 950 line of onboard graphic solutions. Mind you the 950 line encompasses many 9xx Intel GMA model numbers like 946GZ,945GM.. Additionally, this work-around is applicable to to many other Intel GMA lines like X3000 etc. As far as I know this solution applies to XP and Vista alike.

     You can read about it in detail here if you want:(wiki)

     Now don’t get me wrong, the man writes beautifully, but never the less it’s a very important but nerdy problem; So here is a quick rundown of what you need to do if your monitor’s native resolution is always or even sporadically unavailible in the display properties

1) Download a small program named MonInfo from the fine people at EnTech Taiwan: Here

2)Run MonInfo it will give you a read out of the data your monitor sends the display adapter (IE GMA 950) to tell it what it’s resolution capabilities are.

3) Select and Copy the info shown in PINK (Later if want more unlisted resolutions you may use PURPLE,BLUE, and ORANGE; just keep substituting)

*

4) Next find the appropriate version of the drivers and open up the .INF (driver file) in Notepad

Intel GMA drivers are availible for download here  or better yet  from the computer’s manufacturer.

Example: 

XP: igxp32.inf

Vista 32: igdlh.inf **

Vista 64: igdlh64.inf

**Should be stored in the Graphics folder in the video driver’s folder

5) In Notepad, find the first entry that closely resembles this

HKR,, DTD_1,%REG_BINARY%, 01,1D,80,18,71,1C,16,20,58,2C,1A,00,00,00,00,00,00,86,37,01 ;1920×1080@60…Interlaced

6) Delete all the numbers except the last two which happen to be 37 and 01 in this case, and substitute and it with the info you got from MonInfo earlier so it looks something like this

HKR,, DTD_1,%REG_BINARY%, 30,2A,00,98,51,00,2A,40,30,70,13,00,78,2D,11,00,00,1E,37,01 ;1920×1080@60…Interlaced

7)  Above what you just edited should be a string that looks like this
“HKR,, TotalDTDCount, %REG_DWORD%, 0″ Change the 0 to 4 so it looks like this

“HKR,, TotalDTDCount, %REG_DWORD%, 4″

Finally save the file (overwriting the existing) and run the driver setup
Hope this helps you poor fools, if you need/want more info on this subject and want to know the whys for the steps refer back to Archibael’s article mentioned above.

I’ll be posting a tutorial video later.